I think Bloomie's major concern is deadlocks, but most of the politicians see $300M thatw ill be coming into the state via the superfund that will, at least in the short term, help things (even if the mis-management of it will cause a cost over-run that will be either settled in court for MORE money, or shoveled back onto the taxpayer.)
I don't know if his idea would be any better, but the important thing is the cleaning of the canal.
BBMW's idea might work if there was a way to divert the natural flow away long enough to keep the canal sufficiently dry to simply excavate rather than dredge the polluted soil. This would also help prevent migration of the settlement downstream.
As for filling it back in? That would not necessarily be the best or cheapest solution, as the soil would be crappy there and discourage developers from building anything there anyway. Add that to no "waterside apartments" and you will lose property value.
The key here is a clean, non smelly waterway. Once that happens, people are more likely to want to build there.
I did say clean it out. I'd just look at doing it dry. That may be easier and more thorough. Nowadays they could probably process and reuse the fill.
In the end, the new land that would be made may be more valuable that having it as a waterway.
Originally Posted by ZippyTheChimp
I don't think there's too much natural flow going on here, to the point were they build a supply tunnel, complete with a ship propeller for a pump, to push the stagnant water out of the canal. I have a feeling you could cap that, cap the end were it flows out into the East River, pump it out, and only get local rain runoff coming back in.
I could be wrong, but I think it would be worth investigating.
I read what you wrote.
You would have to cofferdam the canal. The banks would have to be stabilized before the water is removed to avoid collapse. Would pumping it out untreated be allowed? Probably not. The highest concentration of suspended material is near the bottom and doesn't move around much, so the water may have to be treated before released.
Process the fill? They've been trying for decades to figure out a way to do that with the upper Hudson River soil contaminated by GE, and that's just one chemical.
They basically did this on a small scale when they excavated the 100 11th Ave site for the Nouvel building. Took 2 years.
Unlike the WTC excavated material going next door to BPC, fill would have to be transported in. The canal isn't big, but it is 2 miles long. That's a lot of truckloads.
True, but really only one end.
Possibly
The banks would have to be stabilized before the water is removed to avoid collapse.
I don't know about this. The canal is open to the East River, and they actively pump water through it. If this was a problem, they'd have to be dealing with it already.
Would pumping it out untreated be allowed? Probably not. The highest concentration of suspended material is near the bottom and doesn't move around much, so the water may have to be treated before released.
Either way (dredged wet, or dug out empty) there going to have to deal with this.
Process the fill? They've been trying for decades to figure out a way to do that with the upper Hudson River soil contaminated by GE, and that's just one chemical.
Truck it to the riverback and dump it in barges. They're going to have to barge out the dredge spoil.They basically did this on a small scale when they excavated the 100 11th Ave site for the Nouvel building. Took 2 years.
Unlike the WTC excavated material going next door to BPC, fill would have to be transported in. The canal isn't big, but it is 2 miles long. That's a lot of truckloads.
Hey, this might be a stupid idea. I started this subthread by saying that. But it also might be worth running the numbers. A big part of that would be the value of a cleaned canal vs the value of the new land created. A lot of that would depend on the amount of commerce driven by the canal. However, if there was a lot of that, they wouldn't be talking about doing residential development along the canal.
Last edited by BBMW; February 4th, 2011 at 11:52 AM.
BB, what zip is saying is not that it can't be done, but there is a LOT of it to be done and that would probably not be feasable.
We are talking about initial overhead before anything can be made of it. A very expensive proposition at any time, nevermind a recession.
What I was suggesting was a way to reduce cost of removal, not in making it permanent....
The only other thing to keep in mind BB is that many things that are current problems are let be if nobody does anything with, near or around them. As soon as you touch them, then you have to follow the rules, even if not doing anything is bad. The main reason for this woud be as Zip suggested, higher concentrations that have been essentially immobile. As soon as you start stirring things up, you run a high risk of a concentrated short-term discharge that would immediately effect the surrounding ecosystem.
IOW, even though 1μg/L/day may be worse than 100μg/L over a month, the rate of discharge, exposure, and ingestion might be too much for the local flora and fauna....
Or it just might smell too much, who knows.
Thing is, things like this have happened before with bad results, so now there are laws to prevent a recurrance.....
Water movement is done to reduce the odor that's caused by stagnant standing water. It's mainly a surface problem and is not the real issue with the canal that made it a superfund site. Pollutants settle toward the bottom.I don't know about this. The canal is open to the East River, and they actively pump water through it. If this was a problem, they'd have to be dealing with it already.
When I said "process the fill," it was in answer to your idea to return it to the site, not just "deal with it."Either way (dredged wet, or dug out empty) there going to have to deal with this.
Of course you left out where all this fill was going to come from, and the cost of getting it to the site.
I think what it all depends on is $.
If the point is to create new real estate, you could do it much cheaper by a landfill project in the East River. If the point is to clean it up, you could do it much cheaper by not filling it in.
You said it twice - "a stupid idea."
If it seems like I know a lot about this, forum veterans may remember a friend of mine from the Corp of Engineers, the Tick Man. Several years ago, he spent considerable time at the canal and other sites in a full environmental suit. During that time, we never invited him to dinner.
What a stinker.
The Superfund Discount
The Gowanus Canal: Toxic wasteland or real-estate hot spot?
By S.Jhoanna Robledo
(Photo: Frances Roberts/Alamy)
Two weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency made it official: The Gowanus Canal is very, very foul. In its new study of the 1.8-mile Brooklyn waterway, declared a Superfund site last year, the Feds called it “one of the most contaminated water bodies in the nation,” laced with carcinogens, runoff, and sewage. Infrastructure work has made it less stinky than it was, but a Maui beachfront it is not.
Which means the $3 million sale of a new house on Bond Street, one block from the canal, is big news. The price is a neighborhood record, by far, and the buyer, Dr. Idan Sharon, is confident that he’s made a good call: “People said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And I said, ‘Listen, go see the place.’ ” The house itself is definitely one-of-a-kind: 25 feet wide, sustainably built, with five stories (including a rental unit), a three-car garage, and a heated pool. “If this was in Manhattan, it’d be three times, four times the price,” Sharon says. Peggy Aguayo, whose firm handled the sale, admits that “I had my doubts. The only houses being sold at that price were in prime locations.” They had a contract within two months.
Yes, there’s a little Gowanus boom going on, driven by the usual proximity and culture.
Artists have been settling here for some years, just as they did in the boho days of Tribeca and Williamsburg, and now they’re being followed by investors and a notable number of doctors. (Useful neighbors to have, if you make contact with the canal water.)
Concert venues, galleries, and bars earned the neighborhood a nod last year in The Wall Street Journal as “the city’s unlikeliest cultural hot spot.” The area is cradled at the nexus of Park Slope, Boerum Hill, and Carroll Gardens, at a far more accessible price.
Michel Cohen, a pediatrician, bought and renovated a house on Carroll Street about two years ago, intending to rent it out, but decided to move in instead. It reminds him, he says, of the Tribeca he knew twenty years ago—“like a little village,” says Cohen.
Some settlers are also oddly fond of the canal itself. “As contaminated as it is, [it] represents nature,” says architect David Briggs, co-founder of the community group Gowanus by Design. “You can see the sky, you can see across neighborhoods, there’s wildlife.” Then there’s the real estate: architecturally heterogeneous and sometimes nonconformist, and definitely cheaper than nearby housing. The median price for a house in Gowanus is $535,000, per Trulia.com; Park Slope’s median is $997,000. (Corcoran’s Robert Herskovitz, who’s marketing a Carroll Street property, says traffic to his open houses has been brisk.)
Local opinion holds that after the cleanup, which starts in 2015 and should take about a decade, prices will probably head upward. “In a way, I think [Superfund designation] is a good thing,” says Cohen. Fear of EPA findings, then the recession, kept away big construction projects for years. Instead, smaller, more mindful change is beginning, successfully. As one poster on the online forum YouBeMom.com put it, “My neighbor’s house just sold for $1.6 million, so yeah … I’m good with that.” And then: “It’s being cleaned up and developed, finally. Why is that so bad?”
http://nymag.com/realestate/realestatecolumn/71562/
February 23, 2011, 7:00 am
Under the Gowanus Canal, Flushing Out the Stench
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
During renovations, a temporary system adds oxygen to the canal SLIDE SHOW
Water flecked with Brooklyn dirt trickled down on Tom O’Brien’s hard hat from the arching ceiling of the Gowanus Canal flushing tunnel.
Fifty-five feet underground, it made for a funny kind of rain. Each drop began as snow on Degraw Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, seeping slowly through sand and earth before wending its way through the tunnel’s seven tightly fitted layers of aging brick and finally falling into its empty cavern.
“The mussels, syringes, crabs, condoms — this is dirty,” Mr. O’Brien said, standing in stagnant black groundwater up to his thighs and pointing around at the bits of city trash, small mollusks and dead crustaceans stuck to the brown and white clumps of algae on the walls. A humid fog hung in the nearly 60-degree air.
Above ground, it was well below freezing.
Mr. O’Brien, a sandhog from Tappan, N.Y., and a small crew of city contractors were among the first people in decades to walk around inside the tunnel, which was recently drained so a major repair job could begin.
Nearly 100 years after fetid water from the Gowanus Canal first flowed under Brooklyn, the city has embarked on an extensive four-year, $140 million renovation of the Gowanus flushing tunnel, a landmark-worthy bit of infrastructure that flushes out the canal by pulling in fresh water from Buttermilk Channel. The goal, now as then, is simple: to get rid of that canal stink.
Making that happen, of course, has proved to be more difficult.
As early as the 1880s – only two decades after first constructing the canal – the city began drawing up plans to address stench. Before settling on a flushing tunnel, the Gowanus was cleansed only by the tides.
South Brooklyn celebrated the official opening of the flushing tunnel – June 21, 1911 – as if it were a holiday. Streets and local businesses were festooned with flags and bunting, and decorated yachts and barges sat in the canal.
“You have now the waters of the Gowanus purified,” Mayor William Jay Gaynor declared as he threw the switch bringing the electric motor and its 9-foot propeller to life. Canal water rushed into the 12-foot diameter tunnel as if from a giant industrial latrine.
But that dead-cat-on-a-wet-doormat odor soon came back, if it ever went away at all.
The history of the flushing tunnel also provides a window into the kind of long-term vision and bungled short-term expedience that alternately benefit and plague efforts to maintain the city’s aging infrastructure.
Take, for instance, the large black sewer pipe currently lying just submerged underwater in the center of the tunnel. Installed clumsily in 1988, the pipe plays no part in cleaning the Gowanus; the city simply borrowed the old tunnel to use as a conduit to a larger sewer instead of digging a new path.
Moreover, the sewer pipe failed “almost immediately,” said Kevin Clarke, an environmental engineer at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, during a recent tour of the flushing tunnel.
After the unsuccessful construction project, the city left the broken sewer pipe and its massive concrete anchors lying uselessly along the aging tunnel floor. The city never cleaned it up — though it did try to get it running in 1998, before it failed again — because the flushing mechanism itself had been broken for decades.
That mechanism – a custom motor and bronzed propeller like that on a large ship – broke down irreparably in the late 1960s. The motor sat dormant until 1999, when the city refurbished it and switched it back on. But the motor remained problematic because of its aging design and custom parts.
Even so, much of the tunnel’s original construction was sturdy, even masterful, and the city plans to make few changes to its structure, which is still sound. “There are no missing bricks,” said Mr. Clarke, who is overseeing the renovation. Only a few areas needed to be patched where large leaks had sprung between the bricks.
The repairs are relatively straightforward: reconstruct the motor pit and replace the propeller with three modern vertical turbines; clean, patch and smooth the interior of the tunnel; replace the broken sewer pipe and encase it in concrete, to improve water flow; and reduce the amount of sewer overflow into the canal by increasing capacity at a nearby pumping plant.
Most of this will be accomplished invisibly underground, but the effect of the change – the city hopes – will be readily detectable in surrounding neighborhoods as the smell improves with the water quality. The renovation work is being done in concert with the federal Superfund cleanup, but is independent of it.
Where the original design of the tunnel pulled water from the canal and deposited it into Buttermilk Channel, the water flow has been reversed since 1999, pumping fresh water in.
The switch was made because the primary culprit behind the smells and failure to support life is the canal’s often low oxygen content. The city aims to boost the flow of water through the tunnel by 40 percent after the renovation, keeping the amount of dissolved oxygen at a stable and high level. Bringing in fresh water – with high oxygen content – achieves that goal more effectively, so the flow will now be permanently reversed.
To ensure the oxygen level stays relatively high while the tunnel is switched off for repairs, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection installed an oxygen system over the summer at Douglas Street. The system includes a 2,500-foot-long system of pipes that snakes through the canal just below the water surface at high tide and bubbles out supersaturated oxygen like the filter on a fish tank.
Even with the temporary bubbler installed, the city admits that the dissolved oxygen level will be lower during the renovation. “We’ve been able to mitigate the smell,” Mr. Clarke said. However, on a recent afternoon, the stench at low tide was noxious to all but the ducks who roamed the soft, contaminated mud at the canal’s head, sinking a little with every step.
But far underground, the tunnel itself exuded only a faint cavelike mustiness. Its lack of foul odor seemed something like a foretaste of an improved, future Gowanus Canal, one that doesn’t send newspaper reporters running to the thesaurus for synonyms for “fetid” or searching for the freshest way to describe the stench of rotting eggs.
Still, Mr. O’Brien insisted that this job was one of the dirtiest he had encountered in his time as a sandhog, or tunnel worker. As he trudged through the accumulated ground water, mussel shells crunched underfoot.
That level of dirty is only temporary, he said. Soon most of the water would be gone and the defunct black pipe replaced by temporary tracks for a small flatbed train with a bench for shuttling supplies and workers up and down the tunnel. “It beats walking,” Mr. O’Brien said. Then the work would really start.
“We’re not in full swing right now,” he said, “but once we are, it’ll be busy.” At least ten more sand hogs will likely be underground, he said.
And by 2013, the flora, fauna and people of the Gowanus area will be able to pass judgment on the quality of their invisible work far beneath the street just by sniffing the air.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...er=rss&emc=rss
Last edited by brianac; February 23rd, 2011 at 12:41 PM.
Interesting, but I wonder if it was cheaper for a bubbler, or if they could have just used an agitator (deliberately cause a mini-waterfall at one end).
That would, however, require flow for proper distribution....
Maybe that is what the two chamber turbine design will try to accomplish, better aeration of the water flow....
Looking for the Beauty Along Brooklyn's Toxic Canal
by Sara Polsky
[Photos by Nathan Kensinger. Click to expand]
The Gowanus Canal is enough of a wasteland that there are whole competitions devoted to its restoration. Still, there's a kind of beauty in the canal as it is, and photographer Nathan Kensinger went looking for it. Above, a few of his photos from the canal; click through for more and larger images.
Gowanus Canal: Toxic Playground [Nathan Kensinger]
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/1...oxic_canal.php
I would certainly consider it interesting, exploring the almost apocalyptic wasteland... But calling it "beautiful"........
Nah. Sorry. Ain't buying it.
It's unfortunate that the owner may have lost his business and people have lost their jobs, but YUCK! I guess it's a messy business but surely it doesn't need to be that disgusting?
A Collapse at a Poultry Shop Exposes a Rift Among Neighbors
By ANNE BARNARD
Some of the neighbors had been heard to express the wish over the years that a divine hand would smite Yeung Sun Live Poultry.
Clucking chickens went into its storefront. Dead ones came out, bound for Chinatown restaurants. So did blood, and entrails, and putrid odors that wafted past the fancy lofts and dark-wood bars of an up-and-coming neighborhood near the Brooklyn waterfront, a place that prefers its industrial grit to look a bit more picturesque and smell a tad less gritty.
So it was with a mix of schadenfreude and guilt that locals greeted the news that the poultry shop had been felled by a freak accident late last week, as city workers dug a tunnel to remedy an even more celebrated stench — that of the Gowanus Canal.
“Thank God,” was the reaction of Mary Gaglio, a real estate agent, upon hearing that one of the abbatoir’s walls had collapsed and that it had been forced, for now, to close. (No one was hurt.) “Get rid of the old and bad,” Ms. Gaglio said, “and build the new.”
Yet the still-uncertain fate of the poultry shop seems to havetouched every nerve in the neighborhood — especially the love-hate tension between the area’s utilitarian past and its gentrified future.
Ms. Gaglio, 61, has spent decades promoting the area, sometimes called the Columbia Street Waterfront District: a tiny enclave between shipping docks and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that abuts Red Hook, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill but is not quite claimed by any of them. Apartments she said she remembered pricing at $175,000 now sell for more than $1 million.
But some residents — even some newer ones — said they were irritated by neighbors who seemed to view themselves as too posh for poultry.
“My opinion is, don’t buy an apartment overlooking a chicken coop if you don’t like the smell of it,” said Florry Shadletsky, who moved in about 12 years ago, before a recent building boom brought a new crop of residents. “It’s an entitled view to try to relocate a business that has been there 50 years.”
(Incorporation records suggested it had been more like 20 years. Still, the shop predated many nearby businesses and residences.)
“There are all these new people who want it to be new and different; I don’t like that,” said Corey Patrick, 34, who was walking his dog past the site and said he had moved to the neighborhood about four years earlier.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places in New York,” he said. “I know what I’m getting into.”
He said that the blood and feathers sometimes spooked his dog, but that workers usually washed them away quickly.“You don’t really hear any death,” he added.
The Columbia Street chicken kerfuffle started decades ago, long before markets that sell and slaughter live animals began their spread across the city, driven by immigrant demand; their number has doubled to 90 over the past 15 years. But the backlash against that growth could now spell doom for Yeung Sun: a 2008 state law bans new slaughterhouses within 1,500 feet of a residence — making it near-impossible for the business to relocate anywhere in the city.
The fight has festered in a neighborhood that is protective of its character, even if it cannot completely agree on what that is.
West of the B.Q.E., Cobble Hill’s Brooklyn-Heights-South ambience fades to something scruffier. A dozen blocks of brownstones, brick houses and garden gnomes slope down to shipping yards overlooked by giant cranes. Storefronts of a recent, artsy vintage — a lingerie boutique, a coffee bar screening Japanese movies — stand alongside bodegas.
Craig Hammerman, the district manager for Brooklyn Community Board 6, said he recalled being flooded with complaints 20 years ago, before gentrification took off, about what were then three slaughterhouses that were grandfathered in as the district became more residential.
The complaints peaked about 10 years ago, he said. Someone brought him a peanut butter jar filled with “ooze and goo that was ponding on the street” near the market, he said, with feathers and entrails floating in it.
He tried to relocate the businesses with city help, but found no sites close enough to their Chinatown wholesale customers.
The conflict ebbed, perhaps because the businesses cleaned up — or perhaps because a shop on Union Street, considered the worst offender, met with misfortune. It burned down and did not reopen.
Lately, it was Yeung Sun that traumatized the sensitive. One family saw a man chase down a fleeing duck, grab it by the neck and drag it to its fate. Victoria Hagman, a real estate agent who moved into the neighborhood nine years ago, said she hated seeing rabbits dash from the shop only to cower in traffic; she raised bunnies as a girl.
More important, she said, she lost buyers to chicken stink, particularly in a lavishly renovated building with an enormous circular window looking down on the sometimes-bloody sidewalk.
Then, on Dec. 23, workers began digging a new sewer under Degraw Street, near Columbia Street. They were working to improve the Gowanus flushing tunnel, a century-old, mile-long and seldom effective waterway designed to sluice fresher harbor water into the stagnant, sewage-tinged Gowanus.
Something went wrong.
According to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, as machinery broke through underground rock, water seeped in, eroding land beneath 183 Columbia Street, a one-story building that held the poultry shop’s walk-in freezer and other equipment. A wall buckled and collapsed. City agencies ordered the building demolished, and closed the building next door, 185 Columbia Street, to assess its stability. Yeung Sen, which occupied both storefronts, had to close.
Last week, as wind whipped between harborside warehouses across the street, the steel claw of a backhoe ripped through the tar paper and timbers of 183 Columbia, exposing scores of plucked chickens still stacked like firewood in their plastic bags.
Tony Ni, who owns the business, stood forlornly outside the fence, filming the scene.
“I lose my business,” Mr. Ni said. His five employees were out of work. He was not sure how much the catastrophe would cost him, whether he would receive compensation or if he would be able to reopen.
According to the city planning department, if the Buildings Department determines that 50 percent or more of the site has been destroyed, he will lose his grandfathered right to run a slaughterhouse there.
Asked about neighborly relations, Mr. Ni laughed bitterly. “The neighborhood don’t like me,” he said.
Many neighborhood businesspeople — even chicken-shop haters — said they had found themselves newly empathetic.
“He didn’t have a lot of friends in the neighborhood,” said Margaret Palca, wearing an apron smudged with pink icing at Margaret Palca Bakes, a few doors down. “A lot of us are into neighborhood beautification and not ugly chicken places.”
But, she said, “He didn’t deserve this.”
Besides, the poultry workers bought coffee from her, she said.
The last slaughterhouse standing, on Sackett Street, kept a low profile last week, its corrugated shutters pulled down tight.
A knock at the steel door brought Jenny Li, in a white apron. She said her uncle founded the business decades ago. “They complain, but we were here before them,” she said. “There was nothing here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/ny...pagewanted=all
People want the look of an old movie without the reality.
All these places forcing out the "original" sounds OK, until you realize that it does not work on such a large scale. Unless you find some means for transport, you are simply corporatizing every little facet of life in the city as the smaller businesses simply cannot afford to be that far away from their base.
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